1. Field of the Present Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of designing and producing sewn products, and, in particular, to a digital platform for rapid product innovation and deployment of sewn products.
2. Background Art
A need exists for a digital platform for more efficiently bringing sewn products to market. This need is driven by three market factors. First, the textile industry lags behind other industries in adopting Internet tools to achieve supply-chain integration advantages. As reported in Textile World, the industry has experienced over-investment the past ten years in plants and machinery; under-investment in information systems, supplier/customer partnerships and strategic alliances; and product innovation; and slow response to growing global market opportunities.
Second, current solutions to these problems are inadequate. The current generation of e-commerce solutions consists mostly of trading exchanges for procurement of raw materials, components and finished goods. Current solutions typically only address order processing and tracking. Examples include ecomtextile.com and fasturn.com. While these solutions could potentially improve the cost of goods, this area has largely been addressed by offshore sourcing, and does not significantly address reducing operating cost. In turn, offshore sourcing has severely hampered the industry""s ability to respond to today""s rapidly changing markets.
Third, the current e-commerce model is inadequate. One provider of next-generation e-commerce tools, lectra.com, is a European company pursuing a traditional software business model. This approach would require that the U.S. apparel industry dramatically change course, to invest significant resources in systems, software, training, and product design talent. In fact, the strong trend is to neglect the product design and product management functions, challenging the existence of traditional players and fostering emerging start-up brands.
As a result of these factors, the industry has two choicesxe2x80x94to invest significant dollars and resources in existing and emerging tools that do not address the real need. As a result, a need exists for an innovative digital platform which will provide value added fashion styling and technology solutions to enable rapid, cost-effective and collaborative product design and delivery.
Briefly summarized, the present invention relates to a xe2x80x9creal timexe2x80x9d, digital platform solution for collaborative Design, Development and Delivery of apparel for designers, manufacturers and retailers. The platform will serve as the xe2x80x9cgo toxe2x80x9d resource for all apparel label owners and their partners that seek innovative fashion styling and new, web-based solutions for developing products quickly and collaboratively. To accomplish this, the entire product life cycle is xe2x80x9cweb-enabled.xe2x80x9d
With this collaborative solution, the ability has been created in concept to provide all of the products and services needed to integrate the industry electronicallyxe2x80x94from manufacturer to consumerxe2x80x94into one interoperable and collaborative digital platform. The ultimate goal is to offer outsourced collaborative solutions for user friendly, digitization of the whole product life cyclexe2x80x94from concept and design through electronic merchandising and distribution.
The present invention will serve as an Application Service Provider (ASP), providing solutions that can:
significantly reduce time and cost to market by up to 300%
enable designers, retailers and manufacturers to focus on their core business, not on costly and resource-intensive technology development and support, and
revitalize the U.S. textile/apparel industry though efficiencies and coordination of scarce and dispersed talent.
Typical delivery lead times from the larger, more established brands is 4 to 8 months due to a layered product management hierarchy and off shore production sourcing. The digital platform, which will enable complete collection design and delivery in less than 3 months and as quick as 3 days, plans to utilize primarily domestic sourcing and a singular layer, fully Integrated Product Team (IPT), with membership from enterprise partners as well as the client. Such rapid production cycles will enable label owners to lower costs of development, to integrate design/development resources into one central location, to minimize managerial hierarchies and to utilize domestic sources of production.